The power of social media: WordCamp San Francisco

In August I had the exciting opportunity to speak at the WordPress annual world conference: WordCamp San Francisco. The best thing about this was the opportunity I had to go and tell hundreds of people from around the world how our users at Carleton, in conjunction with the CCMS Project Team (now Web Services) had managed to establish 240 websites WordPress in just two years. You can view the presentation online. From the conversations I had after I had spoken, it is clear that we as a web community at Carleton are using WordPress far and beyond all universities and most businesses who were represented at the conference.

The main reason I am blogging about this though is to highlight how I ended up speaking at such an important and prestigious venue, because it is a great illustration of the power of social media.

I had no idea, six days before I was speaking to a packed theatre in San Francisco, that I would be doing so. I was scheduled to attend the conference, but only as an audience member. On the weekend before I was due to fly out, members of our team were tweeting back and forth on the subject of the conference, using the hash tag WCSF so others interested in the subject would see what we were discussing. I mentioned I would be there, representing the university who had more WP websites than any other (without knowing if this were true or not!) Literally half an hour later I received an email from the head of user experience with WordPress, saying that I had to speak at WordCamp. She had seen my tweet, googled Carleton, found a presentation Mary Kathryn Roberts and I had made at a previous conference, and decided our story was a definite must for WordCamp. That is the power of tools like Twitter.